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Alex Honnold Hits Back at Truck Post Critics

Alex Honnold recently posted on social media about his new partnership with Rivian, an electric car company that has manufactured an electric powered truck.

While many of the comments were meant to be humourous, many people went out of their way to try to dis-credit electric vehicles with uneducated and over-the-top comments.

While Honnold often doesn’t interact with online comments, in the past, he has replied to people commenting about more than his free soloing. This has happened with his social media posts about being a vegan and solar power.

Honnold is a leading figure in climbing in a number of ways and donates much of his income to the Honnold Foundation.

The Honnold Foundation, which you can read more about here describes itself as, “The Honnold Foundation envisions a world where all people have equal access to opportunity and live in balance with the environment. We believe in solar as a proven, environmentally sound solution to global energy poverty, and we award grants to bold and ethical organizations driving innovation in the solar industry.”

Honnold’s Electric Vehicle Reply

Yesterday I posted about my new partnership with @rivianofficial and how excited I was that there were more rugged additions coming to the electric vehicle market. I got a lot of comments and messages that questioned the environmental merits of electric vehicles. Normally I ignore most online commentary – I get so many people calling me stupid or crazy that it’s typically better to not wade into the muck.

But in this case I care enough to dive in, so here are a few responses to many of the comments yesterday:

– Yes, it’s almost always a better choice environmentally to hold onto your existing car than buy a new one. But in this case we mostly use @sannimccandless’s rusted old Subaru for cragging around town and it’s not unlikely that the engine will fall out at some point soon. Cars eventually wear out; new replacements should be electric.

– We have solar on our home, so an electric vehicle will be powered by the sun. (Which excites me a little to even write. When you think about how much conflict exists in the world over oil resources it feels pretty freakin’ good to opt out as best I can.) But even in parts of the country where the grid is mostly powered by coal or natural gas an electric car still typically results in fewer emissions than a comparable gas car. And more importantly, the grid all over the world is constantly getting cleaner whereas internal combustion engines have already had more than a hundred years of refinement and are hard to improve much further (consider all the diesel emissions scandals of late…). Electric cars basically get cleaner with time as electricity generation gets cleaner; gas cars will always burn gas.

– There are definite impacts to mining lithium or rare earth metals for batteries. But there are also clear impacts to extracting oil and gas or, say, mining for coal by removing entire mountaintops. This issue is almost too complex to discuss in a caption, or at least it deserves it’s own deep dive in a further caption.

I strongly encourage everyone to do their own research – I’ve read several books about electric cars/batteries over the years and just did an internet deep dive after seeing the comments from yesterday. More in Honnold’s post…

Yesterday I posted about my new partnership with @rivianofficial and how excited I was that there were more rugged additions coming to the electric vehicle market. I got a lot of comments and messages that questioned the environmental merits of electric vehicles. Normally I ignore most online commentary – I get so many people calling me stupid or crazy that it’s typically better to not wade into the muck. But in this case I care enough to dive in, so here are a few responses to many of the comments yesterday: – Yes, it’s almost always a better choice environmentally to hold onto your existing car than buy a new one. But in this case we mostly use @sannimccandless’s rusted old Subaru for cragging around town and it’s not unlikely that the engine will fall out at some point soon. Cars eventually wear out; new replacements should be electric. – We have solar on our home, so an electric vehicle will be powered by the sun. (Which excites me a little to even write. When you think about how much conflict exists in the world over oil resources it feels pretty freakin’ good to opt out as best I can.) But even in parts of the country where the grid is mostly powered by coal or natural gas an electric car still typically results in fewer emissions than a comparable gas car. And more importantly, the grid all over the world is constantly getting cleaner whereas internal combustion engines have already had more than a hundred years of refinement and are hard to improve much further (consider all the diesel emissions scandals of late…). Electric cars basically get cleaner with time as electricity generation gets cleaner; gas cars will always burn gas. – There are definite impacts to mining lithium or rare earth metals for batteries. But there are also clear impacts to extracting oil and gas or, say, mining for coal by removing entire mountaintops. This issue is almost too complex to discuss in a caption, or at least it deserves it’s own deep dive in a further caption. I strongly encourage everyone to do their own research – I’ve read several books about electric cars/batteries over the years and just did an internet deep dive after seeing the comments from yesterday (cont)

A post shared by Alex Honnold (@alexhonnold) on

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